Help me! I can breathe!

There is a lot of air in Brooklyn. I had never noticed all this air until a few nights ago. I usually walk my dog down Fifth Avenue, a small two way street but a main thoroughfare for pedestrian Park Slopers. I decided to walk in the opposite direction, which would be North Brooklyn on a map. But with streets crisscrossing at varied angles, it was very easy to get disoriented. I crossed Flatbush Avenue, a street that runs through all of Brooklyn. As soon as I dodged a few cars, I walked along a small residential street, St. Mark’s Pl.

When I saw how much openness was in the world, I started to well up with tears. I don’t know if it was the cinematic lighting of the sky (if there were a soundtrack to my life, “Pale Blue Eyes” by the Velvet Underground would have been playing), or if it was hormones (I’ve been having weird quasi-menopausal hot flashes), or if it was really because I was so unused to…well, to air.

The streets were completely empty. I couldn’t even see the flickering of tv sets through windows. I have been in the country before, but that’s a whole different kind of outside experience. You go to the country expecting to be able to hear yourself think. But when you’re a block away from Flatbush Ave, which is basically a highway, silence sneaks up from behind you and hits you in the back of the head with a black sock full of pennies.

Prospect Heights is a short neighborhood, rarely ever reaching over four stories tall. And if you look east, towards the rest of King’s County, the rest of the borough is made of short row houses. So there was nothing to obstruct my view of the sky. More space than I had every really experiences was just above an expanse of white scalloped aluminum middle class roofs.